A website that lists the victims of Righthaven LLC 'shakedown' lawsuits that are causing irreparable harm to bloggers and advocacy websites.

Righthaven LLC -- a bottom feeding legal outfit -- has teamed up with the Las Vegas Review-Journal and Denver Post to sue mom and pop websites, advocacy and public interest groups and forum board operators for copyright infringement. The strategy of Righthaven is to sue thousands of these website owners, who are primarily unfunded and will be forced to settle out of court.

To date Righthaven has been ordered to pay $323,138 in legal fees and sanctions.

Thursday, July 28, 2011

I received this email from one of the top lawyers defending Righthaven victims and it illustrates how low some will stoop to bring people down. He said this is a good example of how copyrights are being used to limit free speech, free enterprise and legitimate fair use and wanted me to share it.

Dear <lawyer redacted>
I am writing you this letter because there have been clear violations of Stephens Media property by two web sites. The owners of these two web sites knew that property was being violated but still allowed articles to be published. The web sites are as follows:
<websites redacted>
There have been threads posted by both sites that have criticized the actions of Righthaven and their policy of protecting copyright material. I would strongly urge that your law firm launch an immediate investigation and if warranted a lawsuit.
Thank you
A Concerned Citizen

The first public tattle tailer to Righthaven was Las Vegas free-lance journalist Steve Friess who questioned in an August 23, 2010 blog post if Righthaven would sue Sharron Angle after finding parts of Review-Journal articles posted to her campaign website. In a separate post on the same day, Friess wrote about a conversation with Steve Gibson who said "I don't have time to review every case I receive a call about." Gibson then trumpeted the fact that his firm hasn't been "ideologically driven."

Only Righthaven knows how many private tattle tailers there have been, and of those, which were ideologically driven. One would imagine that there have been numerous "tattle tail" letters sent to Righthaven by ideological and business competitors. Possibly so numerous that some are now sending them to attorneys simply connected to Righthaven lawsuits at all, not even knowledgeable enough to know how badly they misfired -- sending it to an attorney defending a Righthaven victim!